Nothing to do with Tom Cruise

The director Tom Dey has optioned The Last Samurai and plans to make a film of it. (I am rather hoping he will persuade Kurosawa Productions to give permission to use the book's original title, The Seventh Samurai.) Dey would like to use animations of scripts such as are to be seen at Kanji Café or Arabic Typography -- if you know Greek, Arabic, Hebrew or Japanese, and also know your way around a program that can achieve these effects, he would love to see a demo. (E-mails sent c/o Paperpools will reach him.)

My hunch is it is easier for someone who already knows one or more of the languages to get up to speed with the software than for a Flash wizard to bluff his way through even one of these languages. There's not much point in putting random letters or characters up on the screen, what one wants is something that enables the audience to replicate the experience of the child, the moment when he suddenly thinks: I can do this!